Moving to Boston four years ago, in 2007, was a big transition for me: starting graduate school, adjusting to life in the city, beginning a relationship, thinking in more structured and practical ways about the sort of life I wanted to construct for myself — and eventually what sort of life Hanna and I might want to construct together. I’m sure many of you Harpies have been in a similar situation. And there are lots of ways in which we’ve figured out the basics of our lives, at least for the next few years: the sort of work we’ll be doing, the friendships we’re forming, the long-distance family relationships we maintain, etc.
But one thing we’re still chewing over is apartment life, and its limitations (at least, in our current situation) to be the sort of sustainable, eco-friendly home we’d like it to be. We’ve lived in the same one-bedroom apartment since moving in together, and while there’s much to recommend it as a student flat we’re starting to outgrow it as two graduate students evolve into a couple with a cat and friends — adult friends! — whom we want to have over for a meal. And Hanna misses having a garden, and chickens, and compost. We hate throwing food scraps in the trash, but there’s nowhere to compost them in our neighborhood. We can do things like put energy saver bulbs in our lamps, and pay for wind energy as a certain proportion of our electric bill, but we can’t make any of the basic decisions about heating and cooling our home since we’re one unit in a building of 20+ apartments.
- Garden Cottages, Orange Splot LLC Co-housing Development
So I’m starting to think about what our next move might be, and how we might plan a little more intelligently for the sort of evironmentally conscious life we desire — while remaining in budget! Because let’s face it, two librarians are just not going to be able to afford top-of-the-line eco-chic condos anytime soon (assuming that was the sort of life we wanted, which we don’t … but there’s no way to get around that most “green” options these days are outside of our price range). While I didn’t grow up in a completely rural area, I’m new to the sort of urban life we have now, where digging a garden in the back yard or buying a composter is totally out of the question.
I’m not looking for a co-housing or communal living situation but some of my friends have found this site very useful:
http://directory.ic.org/records/?action=search&advanced=true
It’s a directory of intentional living communities of all shapes and sizes.
Ooh, ooh, fellow librarian, recent grad, and eco-conscious apartment-dweller here!
I have some suggestions that may or may not work for you:
1) In my city, you can rent allotments – plots of land for gardening. You can even put in little sheds or lockers so you don’t have to haul your equipment on your bike (although most people here have cars). It’s an excellent option for having a practical-sized garden while living in an apartment. You have to plant stuff that can do without attention for a day or two, since you won’t want to make the trip every single day if you’re working full-time.
2) Indoor composting. I’m not super in love with hauling it to the allotment from my apartment, but c’est la vie. Someone in your city will be able to hook you up with worms (ask people at the allotment!), or you can go with an electric composter.
3) While living in a small space, which you must use for your public/social lives as well as your private/individual lives, I find that acquiring certain pieces of furniture can help. Being able to quickly adjust the way the space “feels” can help make the selfsame space serve as public/party space and private space. For example, I’ve made good use of bamboo or paper screens, or even a sheet hung from the walls or ceiling, to divide a room when I’m at home with a partner or roommate and want to have a sense of privacy; when this is removed or pushed against a wall, the space is completely changed, and it “feels” like I’m not somehow entertaining guests in private space (even though it’s the same space!). Even pushing a table from one spot to another adjusts the space in a way that feels less invasive to me when I’m having people over.
Good luck on developing your life in Boston, and on maybe doing the co-housing thing one day!
As someone who lives in the Boston area I would say there are some things you can do on a smaller scale at least. I used to live in Somerville and they have a community garden in the Davis Square area if you are interested in gardening, but don’t have the space. I currently live in Watertown and living a little out of the city has the advantage of being able to have a small back yard where you can garden and/or compost. We live in a two unit house and compost with our neighbor. We don’t garden, but we take advantage of local farms for produce during the summer. This farm also offers summer and fall farm shares. We haven’t done that yet because we aren’t convinced that we could use all the food a farm share provides. We also have a local landlord who is open to many suggestions in terms of changes to the property. I think that is more often the case than with large complexes. Watertown also has electric buses which I especially like.
I hope you can find a place to live that suits your needs.
This is why the suburbs are popular….you get space to do what you want, while not being too isolated from other people.
I grew up in the country, and apartment living was really hard on me. Eventually, my husband and I settled in a semi-rural area, 15 minutes from two medium cities.
We moved around some in between, and now live in a “regular” suburb, 5 minutes from a small city, 15 min. from two medium cities.
We’ve been able to garden, have all sorts of pets, from dog, cat, chickens, to rabbits.
The cost of buying a house is now super-exhorbitant, however. Renting a house is always a good option, esp. with all the houses on the market right now.
One thing I’ve been looking into for when the kids are grown, is moving into a micro-home…these are homes less than about 600 sq. feet, and can be built for a lower cost than conventional homes. Because of their small size, they are very energy efficient (heats quickly). It’s something to look into, if you can get a piece of property that someone is subdividing, or some such.
I kind of get the sense that there are two things going on in your question – one about sustainability in a pure resource use sense, but one about sustainability in terms of living closer to the land and the productive cycle.
The first question is easier to answer. Some of the places where you can focus on sustainability in a city apartment include transportation (can you bike or use public transit more? If you own a car, could you switch to car sharing?), consumption (buying local food, buying sustainable products, buying less). Even looking into something like weather-stripping your windows and doors could make a difference in reducing your energy usage.
You can also become involved politically. San Francisco has a citywide green waste and composting program – perhaps you could advocate for a similar program in Boston. Community gardens are always looking for supporters. A friend back in New York was heavily involved in a program to bring school kids to work in community gardens that she thought was very valuable. In some cities, keeping animals, planting food crops in the front yard, or even drying laundry outside are not allowed from a zoning perspective. Getting connected to local groups involved in these sort of issues could help you work to change your city to become more sustainable.
From a pure resource usage perspective, living in a small, existing apartment in a dense urban area and walking/biking/using public transit is a very energy-efficient lifestyle. But from an emotional perspective, it’s not so satisfying to know you’re using less if what you really want is to be closer to your food and to self-sufficiency. One thing I might suggest is for your next apartment, making it a priority to find a place with a large deck or small backyard. So long as you’ve got a scrap of space and some good direct light, there’s tons that you can grow.
Something else that also mattered to me – finding an apartment that could accomodate a big dining table. I love feeding people, and the ability to gather my closest friends around a big table is really nourishing. Also, in my experience, there’s something especially soulless and sterile about living in a large apartment building. Smaller buildings with 3-5 units may be more congenial.
Thanks for all the good ideas, Harpies! I’m looking forward to reading them in more detail when I have time.
We did subscribe to a CSA this summer, which has been wonderful! It’s been a great way to support a local farm AND get some of the fresh produce that we’d both been craving and unable to grow ourselves.
Well, I have to say first of all that it’s nice to remember that as a general rule, people with no money are kinder to the environment than people with extra spending money. It’s nice to drive a hybrid car, but in the end it’s not really worth the total carbon output that comes with getting a new car. For every new car that’s built, resources need to be mined, processed, and/or created in various places in the world, then shipped to other places in the world where they’re put together with other processed things, then sometimes shipped again to be put together into a car, then sometimes shipped again to be sold to the ultimate car-buyer. Hanging on to your old car until it dies is usually more environmentally friendly even if your old car is something of a gas -guzzler. Of course if you need to buy a car, then it’s wise to buy an efficient on, and if you’re not looking to buy a car then this doesn’t matter except as a paradigm to consider: buy things used instead of new, consider the less-obvious ways that your choices may be making an impact. I had a 1992 Jeep that I drove until it fell apart (like, I could look down and see the ground moving beneath my feet, Flintstones-style) because 1. I was too poor to get a new one, and 2. buying is always wasteful. So cutting down on your consumption is probably the best way to make an impact.
In terms of apartments, also remember that multiple-person apartments are more efficient than single-person apartments, and living in a city is actually more energy efficient altogether than most suburban, rural, or semi-rural living situations. It may not feel like it, because you’re in something of a concrete jungle and have no garden and so on, but on a macro scale things like yards are incredibly wasteful, and composting may not make up for the toll that, for example, an even slightly longer commute may have. Also, small apartments with two people are much more energy efficient than houses with two people, or apartments with one person, and so on.
Also, those “eco-friendly” or “green” condos that they’re building now–I just find that most of that is total bullshit. Building new buildings is incredibly hard on the environment because of the resources it takes to put together a building, shipping costs, and so on. Making a building slightly more eco-friendly is often not worth the dramatic cost of building those eco-friendly buildings, and more good can be done by remembering to turn off your lightbulbs, taking a bike instead of a car, or any number of lifestyle changes (which are much more difficult), as opposed to “Lifestyle!” changes, which are often more cosmetic than anything else.
But knowing the facts of your environmental kindliness seems to be only part of your concern, which is also on lifestyle. A couple things I’d recommend doing: look into green cleaning. Namely, vinegar. Vinegar, baking soda, salt, lemons, mineral or some other kind of oil (for wood)–those things are far kinder to the environment than most cleaning products you can buy. I belong to BJs and I get a couple 3-gallon things of vinegar every few months, and use it to clean everything. It’s amazing. I do still use bleach in the toilet and every now and then in the tub, but I use only the basic liquid bleach (which, from what I understand, breaks down into fairly innocuous elements eventually, so isn’t quite as violent as some of the other crazy chemical stuff).
I second the suggestion of things like sealing windows, which is an amazing way to save money AND energy.
Also, look into worm composting, which can usually be done in your kitchen without smelliness. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time but I am a terrible procrastinator. There are people in RI who sell worms (The Worm Ladies) and they’ll ship you a pound of worms, and you can build your own composter, and then you’ll have worm castings and worm juice, which is totally good for your waste-impact and garden/houseplants. (Also, if you have a sunny kitchen, you can grow herbs inside! I have thyme and rosemary and it’s great). Also if you move somewhere with a deck, you can get a container garden!
Ok as for gardening: check with your university to see if there’s a community garden associated with the school. A friend of mine goes to Yale, and they have a graduate school community garden that students can sign up for, and everybody helps take care of it and they get produce and such, and it’s awesome. Also non-university associated community gardens are probably all over Boston.
Warning though: be careful about urban gardening. A professor of mine from college (environmental science) did work on urban gardening, and he found that lots of Bostonian urban gardeners were unknowingly ingesting wayyy too much lead. Apparently Boston–the more urban, the worse it is–is full of lead because of leaded gasoline, which leached into the soil for years and was never remediated. Also Boston has a breathtaking number of lead pipes–like, miles and miles–so your water might already have high amounts of lead, and you don’t want to compound that by eating lead-filled veggies from your garden. You can send soil sampled to UMass Amherst and for $10 they’ll test your soil for heavy metals and other possible contaminants. I had a chance to have a plot on campus this year, and the space (which was supposed to have been tested already) ended up being a HAZARDOUS WASTE SITE, like as in the recommendation was like, “Call the EPA because this shit needs to be fixed ASAP.” I ended up filling two kiddie pools with soil and having a container garden, and it’s been delightful.
If you end up moving into a more grown-up-like place, don’t buy new furniture at Ikea. Well, don’t buy non-upholstered furniture at Ikea or wherever. You can usually get nice wooden tables and stuff at garage sales or thrift stores–all the furniture at my house was free or purchased on the Super Cheap at yard sales or Goodwill, and my apartment looks much nicer than most of my cohort’s places, which are frequently filled with cheapy-looking and shoddily-made Ikea furniture (which was also wayyy more expensive than what I paid). Having beautiful wooden furniture that’s old and carved all pretty-like is–for someone like me at least–a total mood-booster and helps me think of myself as a grown up. Plus I feel good knowing that I kept something out of the landfill and didn’t get something that required trees to be cut down, screws to be mined/made, and parts shipped all over to get it. If your university has a grad student listserv or forum or something, people tend to post for sale stuff all the time. Also troll craigslist for furniture that’s for sale and for announcements about yard/garage sales, which will probably still be going on for a week or two.
Finally, learn how to fix stuff. Fixing stuff instead of buying new stuff is not only psychologically satisfying, it’s also cheaper and more environmentally-friendly than buying.
A lot of your tips are reminding me how much we already do, which is nice. I’ll have to look into the indoor composting option, although when I did some research on it before all the units seemed too large for our tiny space.
I think we’re still in the sort of meta planning stages of thinking about not just how to live more consciously in the space we have, but also what kind of space we want and how to do that in a conscientious manner. How to, for example, balance the desire for a private home with the desire for the efficiency that multi-family units provide. Hence the interest in co-housing options.
Cohousing does happen in urban areas, including brownfield cohousing. More often in Europe, but there is apparently some in the US. In Oz the urban intentional communities tend not to be part of a wider movement, so they’re harder to track down.
Which leads to my next point… it might be worth collecting a bunch of friends and buying a house with garden, then converting it into suitable apartments. You’d probably want to start by seducing an architect into your group. That’s what I did
They know phenomenal amounts of useful stuff about what you can do, should do, and will be allowed to do.
Amen to everything Cimorene said!
Everyone says to me: why don’t you get a Prius? I’m all because my 11 yr old car is *almost* as efficient, and I don’t want to take up all the resources that go into a new car until this one is falling apart (or I can see my feet go through the bottom like Cimorene said).
I agree that a lot of the new “green” housing is bullshit. It is much greener to buy an existing home, which the resources have already been used for, and make it more energy efficient, than to contribute to stripping resources for the “green” housing.
Don’t consume new resources in the first place, and reuse things that are already out there. That’s the greenest way to go.
If you buy something new, get a good quality item that will last longer, much better than getting rid of creating demand for more resource usage every few years. The husband and I bought a solid oak bedroom set. It’s 17 yrs old and still looks brand new. We bought it planning to use it until we move into a nursing home, then our kids can have it.
Darn, wish there was a way to edit these posts. In my last paragraph it should read:
better than getting rid of a poor quality item every few years, thereby creating demand for more resources.
Stupid mousepad on this laptap randomly unlocks itself and sends words into the middle of sentences where I don’t want them.
I agree with you Anna about the importance of being able to have separate spaces when you are living with others, so that is always on the “must have” list when working out the housing sitch. In terms of how I got to my current housing situation, I tend to draw up 2 columns: “if money were no object” and “must have”.
At the moment I’m living in a Californian bungalow that has been converted into 2 separate residences. There’s a shared backyard with some citrus trees and other fruit and veg, and of course a compost. There are down sides but when the budget considerations come into it that’s when the “must have” list really drives what’s going on.
I totally identify with the need for solo space—I have friends who live either with a partner or a roommate in a one-room studio apt and I don’t know how they stand it. No matter how much you love someone, you just don’t want to be up in each other’s faces 24-7. Well, at least, I don’t. I think that’s part of the reason that even dedicated urbanites start thinking about moving out to the ‘burbs once they partner up or have children. Unless you have oodles of money, it might be the only way to have enough space to keep your sanity.
I am really grateful for urban living because it makes environmentally conscious living much easier—no need for a car, smaller spaces to heat and cool, no yards to be watered. But I hear ya on the compost issue. I now freeze all my fruit’n'veg scraps and then drop them off at a composting point every couple weeks. It requires a trip into Manhattan because there’s not a place near me in Brooklyn. Total pain in the ass., but there it is. Anna, I forget where exactly you live but I know there’s a composting drop-off or two in Cambridge. Not sure how inconvenient that is for you, though.
I have friends in my building who have done the indoor worm box composting and didn’t find it as easy as they’d expected. It requires careful attention to how moist/dry/acidic the environment is within the box, and yes, the box takes up some space. When I looked into it, I was told that if you have the standard apt-sized box, the worms can consume about a handful of scraps a day. Which, for me, is not really enough composting capacity, because I eat at home a lot and make my own juice nearly every day, so I generate a LOT of food waste. It just didn’t seem like an easy option to me, which is why I wind up toting the stuff to the drop-off point.
@Cimorene – You’re generally correct with your statements about environmental impact, but I’m afraid that lifecycle analysis is way more nuanced than the way you’re portraying it. For example, it’s true that producing a new car has environmental impacts, and moreover the electricity that runs a Prius also has carbon outputs. However, cars are some of the worst contributors to carbon outputs for a couple of reasons: 1) they are distributed sources instead of point sources so the carbon they emit is very difficult to capture or deal with in any way; 2) the catalytic converter on a car actually leads to there being more CO2 in car exhaust then there would be if the same fuel was burned in a power plant, because power plants have scrubbers that actually remove the CO from the waste stream instead of converting it to CO2 (which doesn’t cause acid rain, the original impetus for the catalytic converter). So while I would say that you shouldn’t necessarily replace a current fuel-efficient car with a new hybrid or electric vehicle, it’s *probably* greener over the long run to buy a new hybrid rather than a used relatively inefficient car, especially because cars are some of the most recyclable things we make (as metal is very easy to recycle in general compared to some other materials).
Similarly, although a lot of new buildings are being greenwashed, some building practices (eg passivhaus) certainly merit the new materials cost. And this is even more true considering that a lot of the Boston area uses oil heat, which is basically the least efficient way to heat a dwelling with fossil fuels.
I don’t know how much these things apply to anna’s situation, but I wanted to point out that when it comes to something like an LCA or carbon balance, a lot of the time it’s difficult to make a determination based on guidelines like “used is always greener” when the types of impact vary widely and a lot of it is extremely situation specific.
I took a composting class and was hoping worms would work for us, but as Becky said, the worms don’t eat a lot and it wouldn’t have made a dent in the scraps we generate. (Luckily we have city-wide composting so we don’t have to resort to trash).
As for dinner parties, we live in a small apartment where there isn’t room to have even a little table set up on the regular. For big dinner parties we use a large fold-up table that can be stored in a closet. We just set it up right in the middle of the living area and use a table cloth. No one seems to mind.
Finally, I’ll second the suggestion to look for an apartment with a small balcony or patio. I took my first crack at container gardening this year, and actually grew tomatoes (I normally can’t keep a house plant alive)! The gardeners amongst us know this already, but it was really magical to watch the little 2-inch seedlings I started with grown into full blown producing plants. Even just the small amount we were able to grow ourselves helped us feel more connected to the productive cycle.
I live in a co-op in the Boston area and I was going to recommend the local co-op scene until I got to “we need our own home with doors to close”. Still, we have some friends who are living temporarily down the street and who have keys and are part of our community – they cook with us and eat with us sometimes, use our compost and our bike rack and our tools, etc. And if the other half of the house we’re renting (a two bedroom apt) ever opens up, we’re planning on expanding to include it as part of the co-op, but in a way that is respectful of those people’s (most likely a couple’s) separate space.
So I guess my advice would be to get to know some folks in co-ops, because those people will likely share most of your values and a lot (though not all) of your desires. And you may find opportunity opening up to become a part of a co-op without actually living with a bunch of other people.